Friday, January 18, 2013

Last night (after much nail-biting), I posted a story on race relations in America, pre-1970s that suggested — based, no not on any pro-Southern, pro-white ideology (which I have none of — au contraire) but based on a certain amount of (ahem)… evidence — that members of the civil rights movement (white or black) perhaps did not always suffer as much at the hands of murderous Southern racists as some of them like to remember… (This coming from a blond male with blue eyes took some daring, you must admit…)

Might it be that the narrative, notably all the movies that we get from Hollywood, is slightly exaggerated?!

I have more than one reason to believe so, notably when I came upon a series of TV show excerpts from the 1960s. In "What's My Line?", part of the program was to have blindfolded jury try to figure out the identity of a given celebrity answering their yes-or-no questions. The mystery challenger therefore would necessary change his or her voice.

It seems that nothing can happen on this planet without leftists the world over, and especially in America, immediately drawing a parallel with America itself (minus its leftist, progressive element, needless to say).

Thus, a decade after Germany murdered millions of people in concentration camps, and all the while the Soviet Union still was murdering millions of people in the Gulag, black Americans in the South were living the same type of horrifying circumstances.

Are we allowed to do the unthinkable and say the (painfully) obvious? Uh, actually, they were not?

Are we allowed to do so without immediately being accused of being racist, of defending Southern whites, and of being brainwashed simpletons and KKK sympathizers thinking that everything was hunky-dory for blacks in the old South?

From Ann Althouse — via Instapundit — we hear that the New York Times is again taking on the dark times of segregation. This, while we get "history" lessons from Oliver Stone on what a swell guy Stalin was, and how the Cold War was all America's fault…

What if the New York Times were told, what if you were told, that, generally speaking, the civil rights movement in the South of the 1950s and 1960s was met not by violence but by, if not respect, if not a lack of violence, certainly by a lack of generalized violence?!

And what if, alternatively, someone — a black leftist?! — were to cry out: "Thank God for Chief Bull Connor"?!

As it turns out, however — get ready for a shocker — MLK, blacks in general, the movement, and (in the final analysis) America itself were all lucky to get Chief Bull Connor (a Democrat) in Birmingham, Alabama — for what happened in Albany, Georgia, may have been more descriptive of the (white) Southern mentality and of how the movement was usually treated…

[In 1962] King's movement, for all its fervor, [was going] nowhere. As fast as his nonviolent columns reached their targets, [Albany's] Chief Pritchett put them in paddy wagons and dispatched them to jails in other counties. Movement leaders could never muster enough recruits to fill all the jails at his disposal. Then, too, Pritchett treated the marchers with unruffled decorum; he had done his homework on King, studied his Gandhian speeches, and planned to overcome nonviolent protest with nonviolent law enforcement.

When demonstrators knelt in prayer, Pritchett bowed his head, then arrested them with a puckish smile. He never clubbed anybody, never called anybody names, and never let his men do so either. Consequently, reporters who covered the Albany campaign saw no brutality on the part of local police to photograph and report. …

Pritchett also placed King under round-the-clock police protection, which irritated him and sent him complaining to the chief. But Pritchett was taking no chances. If King was attacked or killed, "the fires would never cease." As the campaign progressed, King and Abernathy developed a grudging respect for him. Once King even canceled a demonstration so that Pritchett could spend the day with his wife. It was their wedding anniversary.

… King and Abernathy came to trial … and several associates, expecting them to be convicted and returned to jail, scheduled mass protest marches. But the city wanted to get rid of King and Abernathy and ax the movement once and for all. The court therefore suspended their sentences and ordered their release. They were free, thrown out of jail again.

By now, King had lost all control of the Albany Movement. … it was no use. The Albany Movement was over. … "We ran out of people before he [Pritchett] ran out of jails."

… [MLK] was steeped in anguish. So many of his own people seemed not to care about the struggle; so many whites were hostile or indifferent.

Many readers, white or black, will scream bloody murder (and racism racism racism!) as they read this, but still, the conclusion is inescapable — over and over again, the civil rights movement went nowhere because many times, and in many places, demonstrators (white or black) were not harmed, because many times Southern whites (for reasons good or ill) did not overreact, and because authorities refrained from arresting members of the movement.

Needless to say, all of this is not to pretend, nor to imply, that everything was hunky-dory in the South, for blacks or for others, or that Southern whites were not hostile or indifferent to blacks and to their (very real) civil rights — they were — nor is it meant to pretend, or to imply, that all men, whatever the color of their skin, should not enjoy the same rights, civil, voting, or other — they should — nor is it meant to believe. But it is to deflate the left's self-serving narrative of Americans, or at least Southerners, as incorrigible Nazis, and of the South, or of America in general, as a nightmarish hellhole of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Members of the civil rights movement are invariably depicted as victims of such a nightmarish society, as are, say, the poor, women, Latinos, gays, etc, etc, as well as those who "fell afoul" of Senator McCarthy.

By contrast, what took place in the same years — the Soviet oppression of people (and peoples), the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe and (attempted) takeover of China, and the communist assassination of millions and millions of citizens (all reasons, obviously, why McCarthyism arose in the first place) — is ignored or downplayed, or often accompanied by the words "Oh yes, terrible, terrible… But! But: we have to make an effort to understand the Soviets… Plus, you know, they had good intentions"!

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

One is tempted to throw a shoe at the monitor and exclaim, "Where have you been?!" when reading the following:

The world is headed for an environmental "catastrophe" if countries do not invest in renewable energy, François Hollande warned on Tuesday.

Speaking at a green energy conference in Abu Dhabi, the French president said that people had an obligation to protect the planet for future generations.

"If we don't act, if we don't do anything, if we don't invest anything, we can be sure that we will have a catastrophe very soon. We have to have confidence to invest in the new energy. We can act together to create this world of renewable energy," he told delegates at the World Future Energy Summit.

One would, of course, be wrong. This is the sort of pablum which elevates the nostalgia factor to say 2002 or 2003, those were the days! Anything was possible in those halcyon days, a mere 2m could become 1b, just like that.....

Within hours of Barack Obama's stating, during the third election debate, that we were no longer living in Cold War times
— all the while accusing Mitt Romney of wanting to take us back to the
1980s (ah! the Reagan years!) in an era when everything is hunky-dory
with the Russians — the New York Times publishes a report from Moscow that states, and indeed does so quite
explicitly, that if anyone is living with a Cold War mentality, it is
the Russians.

Incidentally, another thing Romney should have said during the third debate (during either debate, really), when Obama referred to clueless Americans still thinking of "the Russians" as the enemy, is that Americans have nothing against the Russians, as in the Russian people, and never have had, it turns out, even — da, da, tovarich — during the Cold War. It is not splitting hairs to insist that what America has been on guard against before, and should be on guard against now, is the attitude of the Russian leaders, the attitude of the Kremlin — especially with both its foreign policy's anti-Western stance and its domestic policy's anti-democracy stance, presently as well as in Soviet times during the Cold War.

Why is that so hard for leftists like the Barack Obama to understand?!
And why is, why was, that so hard for conservatives like Romney to voice?!

The members of Russia’s
lower house of Parliament — which last year passed so many harsh new
laws with so little debate that commentators compared it to a “rabid
printer” — returned to work last week as the standard-bearers for
President Vladimir V. Putin’s brand of patriotism.

Having captured the world’s attention in December by banning all adoptions
of Russian children by American families, members of Parliament have
dreamed up a variety of further proposals to purge Russian politics and
civic life of foreign influences.

Among them: A full ban on all foreign adoption. A requirement that the
children of Russian officials return directly to Russia after studying
abroad, lest their parent lose his or her post. A requirement that
officials’ children be barred from studying abroad altogether. A
requirement that movie theaters screen Russian-made films no less than
20 percent of the time, or face fines as high as 400,000 rubles, or
about $13,000.

One group of legislators is working on a bill that would prevent anyone
with foreign citizenship, including Russians, from criticizing the
government on television. One proposal would ban the use of foreign
driver’s licenses, another would require officials to drive Russian-made
cars. One deputy has recommended strictly limiting marriages between
Russian officials and foreigners, at least those from states that were
not formerly Soviet.

So who is it who is adopting a hostile stance, Barack Obama?!
Who is it who is doing the flag-waving and being paranoid?!
Is it really Americans?! Really?!

Many of these ideas sound eccentric, in a capital city whose elite are
well-traveled and integrated into the West, and are very unlikely to
advance and become law. But they certainly will not hurt anyone’s career
in the current political environment.

So who is it who is adopting a hostile stance, Barack Obama?!
Who is it who is doing the flag-waving and being paranoid?!

“You know, there is a principle in questions of patriotism or protecting
the interests of the country, as the authorities see it, that it’s
better to overdo it than to show weakness,” said Aleksei V. Makarkin, an
analyst at the Center for Political Technologies
in Moscow. “If you try too hard, and come up with some exotic,
scandalous draft law, you are in any case one of us. Maybe you are too
emotional — you’re a patriot.”

Since Mr. Putin’s inauguration, the Duma, the lower house of Parliament,
has hurriedly passed a series of initiatives tightening the state’s
control over dissent and political activism: it has steeply increased
fines for Russians who take part in unauthorized protests; required
nonprofit organizations to register as “foreign agents” if they receive
money from overseas; reinstated criminal penalties for slander; and
vastly expanded the definition of treason to include assisting
international organizations.

When the adoption ban passed, cutting off all adoptions of Russian
children by Americans, only four deputies out of 406 voted against it,
with 400 voting for it and two abstaining. Grigory A. Yavlinsky, the
founder of the liberal party Yabloko, described the vote on his blog as “a unanimous pseudo-patriotic frenzy.”

… Yevgeny N. Minchenko, director of the International Institute for Political Expertise,
said the major pieces of legislation that passed through the Duma last
year were produced by staff members in Mr. Putin’s administration. Last
year, he said, demonstrated that the Parliament serves as an
“instrument” of the Kremlin.

“Unfortunately, in my view, there is a dangerous trend that practically
the only way to consolidate all the parliamentary factions is with
various kinds of anti-Western initiatives,” Mr. Minchenko said.

So who is it who is adopting a hostile stance, Barack Obama?!
Who is it who is doing the flag-waving and being paranoid?!

Mr. Putin has made patriotism a central theme of his third presidential
term, and Yevgeny A. Fyodorov, a United Russia deputy, said
strengthening Russia’s sovereignty is now the Duma’s “most important
direction.”

Mr. Fyodorov said he would like to see the Constitution amended to allow
for a national ideology, something that is now explicitly excluded in
the text, but concedes that this will take time. He said the adoption
ban — or, as he called it, “the ban on the export of children” —
signaled the beginning of a major effort to “strengthen Russia’s
sovereignty” by purging foreign influences on civic life.

“You know the saying — we saddle up slowly, but we ride fast,” he said.
“The U-turn has just begun, and the most radical steps, including the
ones connected to the Constitution, will take place in three or four
years.”

Mr. Fyodorov, whose proposal to bar government officials from keeping
property overseas has won some support in the Kremlin, said any
permanent ties between government officials and foreign countries — a
child residing abroad, or a spouse with property outside Russia —
constitute a “factor of distrust” that, according to legislation passed
last year, can now serve as grounds for an official’s dismissal. The
long-term task, he said, “is to gradually reformat the elite to fit the
national mood.”

“The existence of a strong connection between an official and foreign
countries — I formulate this broadly — is a factor of distrust,” Mr.
Fyodorov said.

This mission is complicated by the fact that Moscow’s ruling class is,
in fact, already deeply integrated into Western Europe. One leader of
the legislative campaign, a United Russia deputy, Sergei Zheleznyak, was
pilloried by a blogger, Aleksei Navalny, because his daughters study at
exclusive institutions in Switzerland and Britain. Nevertheless, the
Kremlin has determined that officials’ foreign holdings must be brought
under control, because they are alienating the public, said Sergei A.
Markov, a political analyst who served as a legislator with United
Russia until last year.

“The population considers the elite to be half-foreign,” he said. “Their
property is abroad, their houses are abroad, their wives are abroad,
their children are abroad. Even Russian industrialists work through
offshore companies. Why do these people run Russia, they say.”

The proposals are bound to raise eyebrows in the West [except in Barack Obama's White House], but they are
actually driven by domestic politics, analysts said. Mr. Minchenko noted
that even as anti-American sentiment surged in the Duma this fall, Mr.
Putin has avoided damaging steps like closing the NATO transit point in
Ulyanovsk. He called the legislative campaign “carefully dosed” to avoid
permanently hurting bilateral relations.

His colleague, Mr. Makarkin, was less sanguine.

“Those initiatives which yesterday seemed exotic could become reality
tomorrow; we saw this happen last year,” he said. “The most important
thing is, there are practically no limitations.”

Purging Russian politics and civic life of foreign influences.

Various kinds of anti-Western initiatives.

Surging anti-American sentiment.

A "unanimous pseudo-patriotic frenzy."

So who is it who is adopting a hostile stance, Barack Obama?!
Who is it who is doing the flag-waving and being paranoid?!

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Le Monde has a map of the opposing forces in Mali — French troops versus Al Qaeda — and how the geography of the west African country makes the central part's Konna (a town recaptured from the rebels by the French) a strategic gatehouse (click on the map for a larger image thereof) to either the southwest or the northeast.

French fighter jets struck deep inside Islamist strongholds in northern
Mali on Sunday, shoving aside months of international hesitation about
storming the region after every other effort by the United States and
its allies to thwart the extremists had failed.

For years, the United States tried to stem the spread of Islamic
militancy in the region by conducting its most ambitious
counterterrorism program ever across these vast, turbulent stretches of
the Sahara.

But as insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this
nation’s elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American
training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns,
trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle,
according to senior Malian military officials.

“It was a disaster,” said one of several senior Malian officers to confirm the defections.

Then an American-trained officer overthrew Mali’s elected government,
setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the
hands of Islamic extremists. American spy planes and surveillance drones
have tried to make sense of the mess, but American officials and their
allies are still scrambling even to get a detailed picture of who they
are up against.

Now, in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western
assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the
world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe, the French
have entered the war themselves.

First, they blunted an Islamist advance, saying the rest of Mali would
have fallen into the hands of militants within days. Then on Sunday,
French warplanes went on the offensive, going after training camps,
depots and other militant positions far inside Islamist-held territory
in an effort to uproot the militants, who have formed one of the largest
havens for jihadists in the world.

Some Defense Department officials, notably officers at the Pentagon’s
Joint Special Operations Command, have pushed for a lethal campaign to
kill senior operatives of two of the extremists groups holding northern
Mali, Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Killing the leadership, they argued, could lead to an internal collapse.

But with its attention and resources so focused on other conflicts in
places like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, the Obama administration
has rejected such strikes in favor of a more cautious, step-back
strategy: helping African nations repel and contain the threat on their own.

Over the last four years, the United States has spent between $520
million and $600 million in a sweeping effort to combat Islamist
militancy in the region without fighting the kind of wars it has waged
in the Middle East. The program stretched from Morocco to Nigeria, and
American officials heralded the Malian military as an exemplary partner.
American Special Forces trained its troops in marksmanship, border
patrol, ambush drills and other counterterrorism skills.

But all that deliberate planning collapsed swiftly when heavily armed,
battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya. They
teamed up with jihadists like Ansar Dine, routed poorly equipped Malian
forces and demoralized them so thoroughly that it set off a mutiny
against the government in the capital, Bamako.

A confidential internal review completed last July by the Pentagon’s
Africa Command concluded that the coup had unfolded too quickly for
American commanders or intelligence analysts to detect any clear warning
signs.

“The coup in Mali progressed very rapidly and with very little warning,”
said Col. Tom Davis, a command spokesman. “The spark that ignited it
occurred within their junior military ranks, who ultimately overthrew
the government, not at the senior leadership level where warning signs
might have been more easily noticed.”

… “The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful,” said another
ranking Malian officer, now engaged in combat. “They made the wrong
choice,” he said of relying on commanders from a group that had been
conducting a 50-year rebellion against the Malian state.

The virtual collapse of the Malian military, including units trained by
United States Special Forces, followed by a coup led by an
American-trained officer, Capt. Amadou Sanogo, astounded and embarrassed
top American military commanders.

… as Islamists pushed south toward the capital last week. With thousands of French citizens in Mali, its former colony, France decided it could not wait any longer, striking the militants at the front line and deep within their haven.

Some experts said that the foreign troops might easily retake the large
towns in northern Mali, but that Islamist fighters have forced children
to fight for them, a deterrent for any invading force, and would likely
use bloody insurgency tactics.

“They have been preparing these towns to be a death trap,” said Rudy
Atallah, the former director of African counterterrorism policy for the
Pentagon. “If an intervention force goes in there, the militants will
turn it into an insurgency war.”

Is that defeatism we see coming from the Pentagon in the Obama years in the final paragraph?

Monday, January 14, 2013

If he were to draw a cartoon of George W Bush intervening militarily in Iraq or Afghanistan — like François Hollande intervening militarily in Mali — do you think that Plantu would have put Dubya in the cockpit of a Canadair fire-fighting plane, dropping water on the flame burning the fuse of a terrorist/a totalitarian bomb?

By intervening militarily in Mali,
reports Hélène Sallon in Le Monde, François Hollande has earned foreign policy kudos, including from numerous newspapers in western Africa. The French presence fighting the Al Qaeda group is slated to grow from the initial 550 soldiers to 2,500.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

The images are chilling, bordering on surreal: On December 18, 1941,
as World War II rages and the horrors of the Third Reich’s “final
solution” grow ever clearer — killing operations at the Chełmno death
camp, for instance, began less than two weeks earlier — Adolf Hitler
presides over a Christmas party in Munich. Stark swastika armbands
jarringly offset the glint of ornaments and tinsel dangling from a giant
Tannenbaum; candles illuminate the festive scene. Confronted with the
scene, a viewer might reasonably ask, How could Nazi leaders reconcile
an ideology of hatred and conquest with the peaceful, joyous spirit of
the holiday — much less its celebration of the birth of the Jewish
Christ?

We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do
with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem. It is inconceivable for us that
Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental
religion.

Those were words of Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm in 1937, in
pre-war attempts to take “oriental” religion out of the holiday by
harking back to the pagan Yule, an ancient Northern European
festival of the winter solstice. (An eye-opening 2009 exhibit at
Cologne’s National Socialism Documentation Centre featured early Nazi
propaganda employed to make over the holidays:
swastika-shaped
cookie-cutters; sunburst tree-toppers, to replace the traditional
ornament Nazis feared looked too much like the Star of David; and
rewritten lyrics to carols that excised all references to Christ.)

But by the time of the 1941 Christmas party featured in this gallery,
with World War II at its height — America had officially entered the
fray just weeks earlier, after Pearl Harbor — the focus shifted to more
practical matters. Rather than trying to dissuade millions of Germans
from celebrating Christmas the way they had for generations, the Reich
instead encouraged them to send cards and care packages to the troops.

The photos published here were part of an enormous stash of color
transparencies made by Hitler’s personal photographer, Hugo Jaeger, and
buried in glass jars on the outskirts of Munich in 1945, near the war’s
end. Advancing Allied forces had almost discovered the pictures during
an earlier search of a house where Jaeger was staying (a bottle of
cognac on top of the transparencies distracted the troops), and Jaeger —
justifiably terrified that the photos would serve as evidence of his
own ardent Nazism — cached them in the ground. A decade later, he
exhumed the pictures; 10 years after that, he sold them to LIFE, which
published a handful in 1970.

In fact, the caption accompanying the one frame from the Christmas
party that was published by LIFE in April 1970 offers a possible
explanation for Hitler’s glum expression in that photo (slide #3):

“In 1941, Hitler gave this Christmas party for his generals. Though
he dominated his officers and came to despise them, Hitler never felt
socially at ease with them — they had better backgrounds and education.
He never invited them to dinner, aware that they looked down on the old
comrades he liked to have around.”

As for the religious views of Hitler himself, the evidence is
conflicting: In public statements he sometimes praised Christianity
(once calling it “the foundation of our national morality”), but in
private conversations — including one recalled by the Third Reich’s
official architect, Albert Speer — the Führer is said to have abhorred
the faith for what he deemed its “meekness and flabbiness.” Hitler did,
however, fervently worship one thing above all else: the so-called Aryan
race. And by the time Hugo Jaeger took the photos seen here, Hitler and
Heinrich Himmler, commanding general of the SS, had articulated and
launched their plan for creating a “master” race — via, in large part,
the mass murder of Europe’s Jews and other “undesirables.”